Residents to help refugees,
This is not the first time University of Colorado Boulder alumnus Wahid Omar has seen his home country in crisis.
Omar, a volunteer for Colorado-based nonprofit Afghans4tomorrow who lives in Loveland, became an Afghan refugee in 1979 when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.
He has continued to work to help Afghanistan through a number of organizations such as Afghans4tomorrow, which aims to provide humanitarian aid, particularly by increasing educational attainment in Afghanistan among girls and women.
The organization has now shifted focus to support incoming refugees, Omar said, and still has multiple staff members in hiding in Afghanistan.
Omar said he was both surprised and not surprised by the collapse of the Afghan government and the Taliban takeover this month.
Omar was in Afghanistan in May when he saw “trigger points” he considered alarm bells warning him to leave, including the U.S. Embassy starting to pull nonessential workers out of the country.
“Quite frankly I was not expecting a turn of events so quickly, where the Afghan government would not do anything to fight and the Taliban would take control of everything,” he said.
Omar said he’s extremely disappointed in the U.S. government and how unprepared they were. His brother-in-law is currently stuck in Kabul and can’t get to the airport because of the overwhelming flood of people trying to flee the country.
“I’m sure everybody is glad that the U.S. troops are back home from a very long war in Afghanistan, and I do sympathize with that, but at the same time they should not forget about the thousands of Afghans who fought alongside the U.S. military personnel and diplomats,” he said.
“They have no chance of surviving under a repressive regime, and so the message I have is to support Afghan
refugees as much as possible here in Colorado.”
CU Boulder Professor Jennifer Fluri has watched the unfolding political and humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan with profound sadness.
Fluri has spent two decades studying gender, security and development in Afghanistan and is closely connected to dozens of Afghans who now fear for their safety under the Taliban.
She’s also angry. Fluri’s research has included international humanitarian and military interventions in Afghanistan, and she said there hasn’t been enough of an effort by policymakers to listen to people on the ground who knew what was and was not working.
“It feels like we’re screaming into a void sometimes,” she said. “It was shocking how fast it all happened. There were so many missteps along the way that could have been addressed that haven’t been, and that’s been frustrating after so much time and money and lives lost over 20 years.”
Now, she is trying to help the Afghans who welcomed her into their homes, who cared for her when she was sick, who she met when they were teenagers and watched grow up, get married and have children.
“These are some of my closest friendships and close personal relationships,” she said. “Even people I haven’t talked to in years, we pick up right where we left off. It’s more than just a job.”
Boulder resident Anna Segur started working with Afghan interpreters in 2016 after a trip to Greece to help refugees.
In Greece she encountered interpreters who had worked with U.S. officials and tried to apply to the U.S. special immigrant visa program but ran into bureaucratic hurdles or were denied, so Segur decided to start trying to help from the U.S.
Segur said she knows interpreters still in Afghanistan who are getting threating letters and have people coming to their homes. One interpreter’s house was burned down recently, and another interpreter’s parents were beaten by the Taliban when they came to their home looking for him.
“I just feel powerless because they are messaging me, ‘I don’t want to die, please save my life,’” Segur said. “All these people I’ve been speaking with, they just want to live in peace. They want their kids to go to school, they want to work and they want to live normal lives.”
Segur said she also hopes to see options for blacklisted interpreters — those who have been fired or otherwise disqualified from applying for a special immigrant visa. In one case, an interpreter Segur knows was blacklisted for getting a date wrong during a counterintelligence screening. Another was fired and blacklisted for taking his sister to the hospital in Pakistan even when he wasn’t given the time off to do so.
“They served faithfully, they have the support of a U.S. military supervisor and there’s no way for them to get around the ban,” she said. “They can’t get to the U.S., they can’t live in Afghanistan and basically their lives are ruined.”
Between her Afghan colleagues and their families, Fluri said she knows up to 100 people who are currently trying to leave Afghanistan.
“These people stuck in Afghanistan really believed in the U.S. and in many ways bargained their futures on a promise the U.S. did not deliver on,” she said. “I think we cannot do enough for them, and that’s both my academic and personal opinion.”
Fluri said she hopes the international community does not abandon Afghanistan, whatever its future government may be.
She has come to know Afghanistan as a complex and layered country that is hospitable to its core, full of people who find humor and joy in even in the most difficult situations.
“If people want to help, the biggest thing they can do this instant is call their elected officials to put pressure on the Biden Administration to help get people out,” she said. “There is so much fear, and even though the Taliban says they are not going to hurt anyone, we can’t trust them.”